gershon hepner - not in a dictionary

“They don’t live in a dictionary, ” Virginia
declared, referring to wild words, but who’s afraid
of big, bad wolves except those people with a linear
mentality for whom all meanings are clichéd.
So take them out from dictionaries and let them walk
around, like prisoners Fidelio released,
and fall in love and mate together when you talk
and write so they, untamed, express their inward beast.

Speaking of the amoral and immoral dalliance of the English language, when it comes to enriching itself by enlarging the vocabulary and inducting new words, Virginia Woolf said, in a recording broadcast on KUSC this morning:
Words are the wildest, fiercest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.... And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, as much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love and mating together... Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English, the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she had gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.

12/5/06

gershon hepner

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